Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Movies

Does the New 'Y2K' Comedy/Disaster/Horror Film Give the '90s the Ending It Deserved? (hollywoodreporter.com) 21

The new movie Y2K is either a comedy or a disaster/horror film, according to Wikipedia. The film "imagines a turn of the century where the machines don't just glitch or stop working," writes the Hollywood Reporter. "They go full homicidal." With a cast that includes 1990s icons like Alicia Silverstone and the lead singer for the Napster-loving 1990s metal band Limp Bizkit, the movie "gives the '90s the ending it deserved," according to the article.

They interviewed the film's director (and co-writer and co-star) Kyle Mooney, best-known for SNL, starting by complimenting his fidelity to the tech of its day. "The film opens with a high schooler getting home and logging into AOL Instant Messenger, which is not a scene I think I've ever seen in another movie..." Mooney: All of my relationships, between 17 and 22 years old, were short-lived and spawned because I was most confident flirting on Instant Messager....

Q: The tech here is such a huge part of the story. Were there any logos or brands you had a tough time getting on camera?

Mooney: Definitely. This isn't really a spoiler, but Jaeden Martell's character's computer — the one that we open up with him logging into AOL — eventually turns into a robot. That was supposed to be an iMac. But I don't think Apple wanted their machines strangling people or whatever the robot does — so we had to change the look of it by, like, 30 percent. There were a few instances like that, where we couldn't get the exact thing, but we were allowed to get as close as possible.

Deadline's article includes a spoiler about the film, but also this interesting note about two of its young actors, Julian Dennison and Jaeden Martell: [A]lthough Dennison and Martell were both born after 2000, they enjoyed slipping into the "lack of convenience and the lack of technology" that came with the era.

"I wish I got to experience that. I wish I didn't live in the age of everything being so accessible," said Martell.

And apparently the movie also incldues a quick shout-out to Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson.

Does the New 'Y2K' Comedy/Disaster/Horror Film Give the '90s the Ending It Deserved?

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward

    "gives the '90s the ending it deserved,"

    Gives it what it “deserved”? The hell did the 90s do to deserve that again?

    Sounds like a Y2K script written by a 19-year old who won a Been There Done That t-shit off eBay and totally “gets” it.

  • by Creepy ( 93888 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @05:32AM (#64997679) Journal

    Ha, Y2K was the most boring evening of my life - I spent it in the office in front of a phone for emergency issues and pretty much slept through a chunk of it (36 hours on, you would, too, no finger pointing). Hoping to avoid the Y2038 bug, when 32 bit Linux flips in a few years. I've actually hit it already, when a 32 bit Sybase database was migrated to 64 bit Linux Oracle and it reported birthdates as like 1/1/2038 for someone born in 1938. Knowing that was a potential issue, I coded an automated script to check for it and came up gold.

    • I remember fixing a whole bunch of Y2038 bugs in the early 2000s. PKI code, using UTCTime. There weren't any certificates extending the far into the future yet, at least not public ones.

  • by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @07:56AM (#64997761)
    Surely the inclusion of 90's tech is just basic set design, not the actual story? Wreck-it Ralph and many others have already mined this vein quite successfully so I'd hope for something other than just lazy references to dialup, Napster and dot matrix printers! Tbh I'd rather just rewatch 'Hackers' again for my nostalgia fix
  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @08:52AM (#64997799) Homepage
    I was 36 years old in 1999 and I was not all that worried about AOL (which was already a sad has-been joke by 1999, anyway). I was more concerned with making sure your bank would remember your balance, your local refinery wouldn't go "ploink" and erupt in a ball of flame, and a thousand other services and supply chains would keep working as expected on Jan 1, 2000. Because, you know, there was a real, actual problem, and not a fake cutesy one like your computer turning into a robot but one that took thousands of people years of work to make sure you wouldn't notice it at showtime. You want to show a real horror movie based on the millennium you don't need to remake Maximum Overdrive with a Y2K sticker slapped over the picture of Stephen King's face. Just show what really would have happened if nobody had cared. You can even probably get all the footage you need just by fan editing Civil War and The Road into a single show.
  • by Mister Transistor ( 259842 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @09:23AM (#64997821) Journal

    The only remotely interesting thing was about Apple making them change the computer since it became evil. I had heard before that they are militant in movie productions about not letting the "Bad Guys (TM)" have an iPhone!

    I thought about that and it came to me that it was a huge spoiler for a suspense movie, a double agent having an Android would be a dead giveaway!

    • by KlomDark ( 6370 )
      It was a dead giveaway in Knives Out - The guy who ended up being the bad guy was the only one that didn't have an iPhone.
  • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @09:35AM (#64997831) Homepage

    In 1999, people were actually fearing this kind of stuff. I had a high school classmate who was stockpiling bullets, because he believed that after Y2K, bullets would be the only thing left that was still worth something, for trade or for finding and killing food. I spent a lot of time reassuring relatives and friends that no, hospital beds don't keep track of the time and won't fold up on their patients. With all the hysteria, it's fitting to have a stupid parody come out like this.

    If it had been released in 1999, I'm afraid a lot of people would have actually believed it.

    • by twms2h ( 473383 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @10:56AM (#64997933) Homepage

      The problem was real, but the catastrophe did not happen because many people were fixing the bug before it could have catastrophic consequences. But because the catastrophe didn't happen, people and the media now think it wasn't real and are ridiculing it.

      I didn't stockpile bullets, but some cans of food instead. We had to eat a week's supply of Tortellini in the January/February of 2000. But just for the off chance of supermarkets not getting supply for a few days due to computer glitches, I would do it again.

      • I think the truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, the problem was real. But no, hospital beds were never going to fold up on patients, and the grid was never going to go down. The kinds of things that were actual risks, were things like prisoners being prematurely set free (or not set free on time), or billing snafus, or negative ages in employee profiles. These things did indeed happen. Armageddon was never in the cards, with or without all the work that went into fixing the Y2K problem.

    • A lot of people were stupid about it, but there was a significant potential for economic disruption with payroll not getting processed for weeks, there was a risk of banking systems flipping back to 1900 and screwing up all sorts of calculations, there was a risk of control systems for utilities failing. The world wouldn't have ended, but it would have been a very expensive mess. We probably spent too much trying to prevent that, but it was still better than just crossing our fingers and hoping that it wo

  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday December 07, 2024 @10:35AM (#64997899)

    People here always bitching and moaning about recycled movie plots and how nothing is original. Well your wish is granted with an original story.

    • That's not an original plot. It's a stupid mashup of y2k jitters and I, Robot (or Robopocalypse).

Trap full -- please empty.

Working...